The Fresco of Technology.

Plato 5th–4th c. BCE · Greece

For Plato, making objects is a second-rank form of knowledge, far below pure thought.

The idea

Plato distinguishes several levels of reality. At the top, the Forms: the perfect world of concepts (the Form of the bed, the ideal bed). Below, the sensible object: the bed the craftsman makes, already an imperfect copy of that Form. Lower still, the image: the painted bed, a copy of a copy. The craftsman who makes things therefore ranks beneath the philosopher who contemplates the Forms. Technē (manual know-how) produces something concrete and useful, but remains, for Plato, remote from truth, which is reserved for thought.

What it contributes

Plato is the first to hierarchise knowledge explicitly, and to place intellectual contemplation (what he calls theoria) above material making. This hierarchy will structure Western culture for two thousand years.

Its limit

By devaluing the gesture and the craftsman, he installs a lasting split between “thinking” and “doing”, between head and hand, which will weigh on the standing of technicians for centuries.

Lineage

There is nothing universal about this devaluation: other civilisations, in China and then in the Arab world, never separated knowledge from the gesture.

Reference Plato, The Republic (Book X) and Gorgias, c. 375 BCE.

Full text The Republic, Jowett translation

Further reading Plato

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Aristotle 4th c. BCE · Greece

Aristotle is the first to analyse what “making” is, but ranks it among the lower activities.

The idea

Aristotle, Plato's pupil, sorts human activities into three families. Theoria: contemplating, knowing for the pleasure of knowing. Praxis: acting, in the moral and political sense. Poiesis: producing, making an object outside oneself. Technē is the knowledge that guides this last one: a genuine, rational knowledge, but turned towards the useful rather than towards the good in itself. He also forges the theory of the “four causes” to account for any made object: its matter, its form, whoever makes it, and the end it serves.

What it contributes

The first rigorous and positive analysis of making as a form of knowledge. The distinction between making (poiesis) and acting (praxis) remains a major tool of thought today.

Its limit

He subordinates technē to the end it serves, and keeps the craftsman, often a slave in the Greek city, apart from the “good life” reserved for free citizens.

Lineage

The Greek hierarchy is handed down, but ancient China, in the very same period, opposes two contrary answers to it.

Reference Aristotle, Metaphysics (Book I) and Nicomachean Ethics (Book VI), 4th c. BCE.

Full text Metaphysics, Book I, Ross translation

Further reading Aristotle

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The Mohists 墨家 · 5th–3rd c. BCE · China

This Chinese school sees in useful technique a good for the people, with no contempt whatsoever for the craftsman.

The idea

The Mohists are the disciples of the philosopher Mozi. They form a school that prizes concrete usefulness in the service of the greatest number. They develop a logic of argument, standards of measurement, and a genuine engineering practice, notably techniques for defending besieged cities. For them, a technique is judged by what it brings to the common good: feeding, protecting, serving the people. Know-how is not shameful, it is precious.

What it contributes

China's first proto-scientific corpus. Unlike the Greeks, they honour the craftsman and practical efficiency instead of despising them.

Its limit

Their thought remains tied to immediate usefulness and to the service of the state. The school declines and then disappears before a rising Confucianism more concerned with morals and rites.

Lineage

The full union of scholarly knowledge and concrete technique will be achieved elsewhere, in the Arab-Muslim world.

Reference The Mozi (墨子), the collected writings of the Mohist school, 5th–3rd c. BCE; A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science, 1978.

Full text The Mozi, Chinese text with English translation

Further reading The Mohists

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Zhuangzi 莊子 · 4th c. BCE · China

This Taoist sage gives warning: rely too much on machines and you end up thinking like one.

The idea

Zhuangzi tells the story of an old gardener who refuses to use a pulley system to draw water, though it would be far more efficient. His reason: whoever uses machines ends up with a “machine heart” (機心, jixin), a mind overrun by calculation, cunning and the pursuit of yield, which loses its spontaneity and its inner peace. This is the idea that a tool transforms not only the world, but also the one who wields it.

What it contributes

Arguably the first critique of alienation by technique in history. He thinks the tool's return effect on the mind of its user, more than two thousand years before modern critiques.

Its limit

His solution leans towards renunciation and withdrawal rather than towards mastery: a risk of passivity, what is called quietism.

Lineage

This intuition of the tool that shapes the mind will resurface, in the age of factories, in Marx and then in Simondon.

Reference Zhuangzi (莊子), “Tian Di” chapter (Heaven and Earth), 4th c. BCE.

Full text Zhuangzi, the “Heaven and Earth” chapter

Further reading Zhuangzi

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al-Khwārizmī c. 780 – c. 850 · Arab-Muslim world

This Baghdad scholar turns calculation into a general procedure: the birth certificate of the algorithm, which bears his name.

The idea

Al-Khwārizmī works in Baghdad under the caliph al-Maʾmūn. In his treatise al-jabr wa-l-muqābala (c. 820), he does not merely solve problems: he reduces every second-degree equation to six possible types, and gives for each the steps to follow, one after another, valid whatever the numbers. Calculation thereby ceases to be a personal talent and becomes a procedure that anyone can execute by following the steps, without having to understand why it works. A second treatise makes the Indian numerals and their positional notation known. Translated into Latin in the 12th century under the title Algoritmi de numero Indorum, his name becomes a common noun: algorism, then algorithm.

What it contributes

He does to calculation, a mental technique, exactly what industry will do much later to the worker's gesture: detach it from whoever holds it so as to make it identically reproducible. It is the demonstration that a formal basis suffices to industrialise a technique, eight centuries before the machine and before modern science. And power follows the tool: his book is written for the division of inheritances, for taxation, land surveying and canal digging, which is to say for the administration of the caliphate.

Its limit

His algebra is written entirely in words, without a single symbol: the formalisation is only begun, and it will take Viète and then Descartes to complete it. Above all, he never theorises what he is doing: it is Latin Europe that, by turning his name into a common noun, will retrospectively credit him with founding the algorithm. Nor does he invent the zero or positional notation, both inherited from Indian mathematics.

Lineage

It remains to be established that this kind of knowledge belongs among the sciences: that is al-Fārābī's move, a generation later. As for the procedure itself, it will wait until the 20th century to be thought as such, and to give its name to the power of the digital era.

Reference al-Khwārizmī, Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala, c. 820; Latin translation Algoritmi de numero Indorum, 12th c.; Roshdi Rashed, Al-Khwārizmī. Le commencement de l'algèbre, 2007; Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, Routledge, 1998.

Full text The Algebra, Rosen's 1831 English translation

Further reading al-Khwārizmī

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al-Fārābī 872–950 · Arab-Muslim world

This Baghdad philosopher ranks the science of machines among the noble forms of knowledge, on an equal footing with the rest.

The idea

Al-Fārābī is known as the “second master”, after Aristotle. He writes a great classification of the sciences of his time. Tellingly, he includes in it the ʿilm al-ḥiyal, the “science of mechanisms” (that of ingenious devices and machines), among the fully legitimate mathematical disciplines. In other words, designing machines is a respectable rational knowledge, and not servile work beneath a thinker.

What it contributes

He reintegrates technique into the field of scholarly knowledge (what philosophers call epistēmē), without the contemptuous hierarchy inherited from the Greeks.

Its limit

His move remains theoretical: it is a classification of forms of knowledge, with little direct effect on the actual production of objects.

Lineage

This legitimation prepares the ground for a scholarly and concrete engineering practice, that of al-Jazari.

Reference al-Fārābī, Iḥṣāʾ al-ʿulūm (The Enumeration of the Sciences), 10th c.

Further reading al-Fārābī

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al-Jazari 1136–1206 · Jazira

This gifted engineer designs automata and clocks, making the machine a genuine work of learning.

The idea

Al-Jazari is an engineer in the service of the princes of the Jazira (upper Mesopotamia). He writes an illustrated treatise describing some fifty devices: monumental clocks, animated automata, hydraulic machines, cam and crankshaft mechanisms (parts that convert one motion into another). Some of these automata are “programmable”, that is, adjustable so as to perform different sequences. He thereby demonstrates that designing a machine is an act of high learning, documented with method.

What it contributes

The summit of medieval engineering on a world scale. The machine is treated here as a work of intelligence, described with precision and rigour.

Its limit

These feats remain court objects, meant to dazzle princes. They do not lead to an industrial production diffused throughout society.

Lineage

It remains to think technique no longer as an isolated object but as a fact of civilisation: what Ibn Khaldūn will do.

Reference al-Jazari, Kitāb fī maʿrifat al-ḥiyal al-handasiyya (The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices), 1206.

Further reading al-Jazari

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Ibn Khaldūn 1332–1406 · Maghreb

This Maghrebi thinker shows that crafts and organised labour are what bring civilisations into being.

The idea

Ibn Khaldūn is considered one of the founders of sociology and of scientific history. He seeks to understand how civilisations are born, prosper, then collapse. At the heart of his explanation he places the ṣināʿa (the crafts, the forms of know-how) and the division of labour: the more a society develops its techniques and specialises its tasks, the more it builds a complex urban civilisation, what he calls ʿumrān. Technique is no longer a mere tool, it becomes a driver of social organisation as a whole.

What it contributes

He links technique, social organisation and the life cycle of empires: a first thinking of technique as a system at the scale of an entire society.

Its limit

The transmission of his work breaks off, and his insight does not lead to an industrial revolution in the Muslim world. This is what historians call the “Needham question”: why did industrialisation take place in Europe, and not elsewhere, despite comparable technical advances?

Lineage

In the end it is modern Europe that will industrialise, by reactivating the Greek split in a new form: the domination of nature.

Reference Ibn Khaldūn, Al-Muqaddima (The Prolegomena), 1377.

Full text Les Prolégomènes, de Slane's French translation

Further reading Ibn Khaldūn

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Francis Bacon 1561–1626 · England

Bacon launches the formula that founds modernity: “knowledge is power”.

The idea

For Bacon, knowledge is not valuable for its own sake alone: it is valuable for the power it confers over nature. He argues for a new method grounded in systematic experiment and observation, against the mere abstract speculation of the Ancients. His Latin formula scientia potentia est, “science is power”, makes knowledge a concrete instrument for dominating nature and improving the material conditions of life.

What it contributes

He founds the idea of an experimental method placed in the service of usefulness and of power, one of the bedrocks of modern science.

Its limit

He reduces nature to a mere stock of resources to be exploited, and asks no question whatever about the social or environmental effects of that exploitation.

Lineage

Descartes extends and systematises this project: making the human being the master of nature.

Reference Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620.

Full text Novum Organum

Further reading Francis Bacon

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René Descartes 1596–1650 · France

Descartes promises that method will make us “masters and possessors of nature”.

The idea

Descartes wants to ground all knowledge in a secure rational method. In the Discourse on the Method, he announces that this new science will make us “as masters and possessors of nature”, notably by improving medicine and the technical arts. He separates radically the mind that thinks (the subject) from extended matter (the world-as-object): this is what is called dualism. The world thereby becomes a vast mechanism that reason can measure, calculate and master.

What it contributes

He founds the modern techno-scientific project and the idea of limitless progress through the methodical mastery of nature.

Its limit

This “instrumental reason” and this dualism, which set the human being against a world reduced to a manipulable object, prefigure what Heidegger will denounce three centuries later under the name Gestell.

Lineage

It will take Marx to think what the machine does, in return, to the relations between people.

Reference René Descartes, Discourse on the Method (Part Six), 1637.

Full text Discourse on the Method

Further reading René Descartes

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Karl Marx 1818–1883 · Germany

Marx demonstrates that the machine is never neutral: it always serves relations of power.

The idea

Marx analyses the nineteenth-century factory. He shows that the machine, far from being a neutral tool, is embedded in relations of production: in the owner's hands it serves to intensify labour, to monitor the worker and to increase profit. He forges the concept of alienation: workers, dispossessed of their know-how and of the product of their labour, become mere cogs in the service of the machine, rather than the reverse. Technique thereby becomes a political and social matter.

What it contributes

He politicises technique: he shows that it can enslave as readily as it can liberate, depending on who owns and controls it. It is the first explicit link between technique, power and economy.

Its limit

In his work technique remains commanded by the economy: it has no logic of its own. He also retains an optimism about the “progress of the productive forces” that will later be criticised.

Lineage

Two questions open up after him: what if technique had a logic of its own (Ellul)? And what if it were first of all a matter of energy (Lotka)?

Reference Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (notably the chapter on machinery and large-scale industry), 1867.

Full text Capital, Volume I, full text

Further reading Karl Marx

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Alfred Lotka 1880–1949 · United States

This scholar defines the tool as an “organ outside the body” that captures energy: the ancestor of the energetic definition of technology.

The idea

Lotka, a mathematician and biophysicist, studies the living through the lens of energy. He proposes the maximum power principle: in evolution, the systems that survive and prevail are those that capture and transform the greatest amount of available energy. He distinguishes our “endosomatic” organs (inside the body: legs, hands) from our “exosomatic” instruments (outside the body: the wheel, the engine, the computer). Techniques are precisely these external organs that multiply our capacity to mobilise energy and to act upon the world.

What it contributes

He founds an energetic reading of the living and of technique. It is the scientific ancestor of the definition of a technology as a system that transforms energy in order to act upon the world.

Its limit

His model is biophysical: on its own it says nothing of social relations, nor of the plays of power between people.

Lineage

The economist Georgescu-Roegen will draw from it bioeconomics and the central role of entropy; the philosopher Stiegler, the idea that the human constitutes itself through this “exosomatisation”.

Reference Alfred J. Lotka, “The Law of Evolution as a Maximal Principle”, Human Biology, 1945; Elements of Physical Biology, 1925.

Further reading Alfred Lotka

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Simone Weil 1909–1943 · France

Weil goes down to the factory floor herself and shows how the machine, badly conceived, crushes the worker instead of serving them.

The idea

A philosopher, Simone Weil leaves teaching to work as a factory hand, notably at Renault, in order to live from the inside what she means to understand. She draws one conclusion from it: the problem is not the machine itself, but the organisation of work that commands it. Assembly-line labour, timed and cut into minute gestures, reduces the worker to a repeated operation, without thought and without any view of the whole. Technique then becomes an instrument of oppression, not because it exists, but because it radically separates the one who executes from the one who designs and decides.

What it contributes

She links concretely technique, the organisation of work and human dignity, on the basis of a lived inquiry rather than an abstract theory. She poses a question that remains open: under what conditions does a technique leave those who use it in command and in understanding of their own gesture?

Its limit

Her thinking, often fragmentary and shot through with spirituality, sketches an ideal of “non-servile work” that is hard to translate into concrete organisation at scale.

Lineage

After the war, this critique of the machine that deskills the worker becomes systematic, from Mumford to Ellul.

Reference Simone Weil, Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression, 1934; La Condition ouvrière, 1951 (posthumous).

My reading Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression, read in full in the Folio essais edition.

Full text Oppression et Liberté, the French volume containing the Réflexions

Further reading Simone Weil

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Alan Turing 1912–1954 · England

Turing defines what a mechanical procedure is, and in the same move demonstrates what no procedure will ever be able to do.

The idea

Turing sets out to answer a question in logic: is there a mechanical method capable of deciding, for any mathematical statement, whether it is provable? To answer it he must first define what a “mechanical method” is, which nobody had done. In 1936 he imagines a minimal device: a tape of cells, a head that reads and writes symbols, a finite table of rules. Anything a human being can compute by applying rules without thinking, this machine can do. He then describes a universal machine, which receives the description of another machine as mere data and executes it: a single machine capable of becoming any other. Then he demonstrates the answer to his original question, and it is negative: some perfectly well-posed problems admit no procedure at all. During the war he puts this thinking at the service of cryptanalysis and breaks the German navy's codes at Bletchley Park. Convicted in 1952 for homosexuality and subjected to forced hormone treatment, he dies two years later: the state that had used his computation destroys him.

What it contributes

He gives at last its definition to what al-Khwārizmī had only practised: the algorithm. And he establishes its limit from the inside, by demonstration: a unique case in this fresco, where the limits of technique are elsewhere moral, social or political. His universal machine is moreover the concept that makes the platform thinkable: a single substrate capable of becoming any tool whatever. Computation is thus born a weapon of state and a military secret, long before becoming an industry.

Its limit

He does not think technique, he does logic: it is retrospectively that his work is read as a founding act. The equivalence between “computable” and “computable by his machine” is besides a hypothesis, known as the Church-Turing thesis, that nothing demonstrates. Finally his “imitation game” of 1950, a mere thought experiment, has been turned into a popular criterion of machine intelligence, a misreading for which the debate on artificial intelligence is still paying.

Lineage

It remains to measure what circulates within these machines, and what is lost on the way: this is what Shannon will do, twelve years later, by giving information a unit and a limit.

Reference Alan Turing, “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 1936; “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Mind, 1950.

Full text “On Computable Numbers”, the 1936 paper (PDF)

Further reading Alan Turing

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André Leroi-Gourhan 1911–1986 · France

This anthropologist shows that the human being has always been technical: the tool extends the body.

The idea

Leroi-Gourhan, a prehistorian and anthropologist, studies the joint evolution of humans and their tools. His thesis: technique did not come “after” the human, it brought the human into being. By standing upright on two legs, we free the hand (for the tool) and the face (for speech); tool and language then advance together. He speaks of exteriorisation, or exosomatisation: the human projects its functions outside its body, first into the knapped flint, then into the machine.

What it contributes

He anchors technique in the very long history of the species (palaeoanthropology) and ties the technical gesture closely to language.

Its limit

His approach is above all descriptive: the political dimension and the relations of power remain in the background.

Lineage

Mumford, for his part, politicises this technical gesture: he distinguishes techniques on a human scale from systems of domination.

Reference André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 2 volumes, 1964–1965.

Further reading André Leroi-Gourhan

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Lewis Mumford 1895–1990 · United States

Mumford sets gentle, human-scale techniques against the “megamachines” that crush the individual.

The idea

A historian of technology, Mumford distinguishes two broad paths. The “polytechnic” (or democratic) way is diverse, decentralised, scaled to human beings and their needs. The “megamachine” (or authoritarian technics) is a giant, centralised and rigid system in which people themselves become cogs: he sees its ancestor in the great pyramids, built by armies of labourers organised as a single machine. Each type of technique carries within it a form of power.

What it contributes

He historicises the great technical systems and brings to light the forms of power they install, from liberty to domination.

Its limit

His typology is at times too clear-cut (good against evil), and tinged with nostalgia for an idealised pre-industrial craftsmanship.

Lineage

Ellul pushes the analysis to its extreme: what if the technical system as a whole had become autonomous and beyond control?

Reference Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, 2 volumes, 1967–1970; Technics and Civilization, 1934.

Further reading Lewis Mumford

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Claude Shannon 1916–2001 · United States

Shannon gives information a unit of measurement, the bit, and demonstrates that every channel carrying it has a physical limit.

The idea

An engineer at Bell Labs, Shannon publishes in 1948 a mathematical theory of communication. In it he defines information as a measurable quantity: not what a message means, but the amount of uncertainty it removes, counted in a unit he names the bit. He lays down the scheme that still structures the whole of the digital world: a source, an encoding, a channel, noise, a decoding, a recipient. And he demonstrates that every channel has a maximum capacity: below it, one can encode so as to make the error as small as one likes despite the noise; above it, this is impossible. To achieve this he explicitly sets meaning aside, holding that the semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

What it contributes

He makes information physical: it has a unit, a medium, a maximum rate, a cost. This is the soundest argument against the discourse that presents digital innovation as immaterial and weightless. And it is his exclusion of meaning that makes layers, protocols and packets possible: one can carry what one does not understand. He thus performs on communication the very gesture al-Khwārizmī performed on calculation, and he performs it from within a private telecommunications monopoly, doubled by military cryptography work kept secret until 1949: whoever owns the network invents the measure of what flows through it.

Its limit

The exclusion of meaning was a restriction of method; the culture turned it into a metaphysics, applying “information” to genetics, to thought and to society. Shannon took alarm at this himself in 1956, to no effect. It also supplied the carrier with its doctrine: I merely transmit, I do not answer for what I transmit. This is still the argument of the platforms today.

Lineage

That same year, Wiener describes the other half of the arrangement: no longer the channel that transmits, but the loop that regulates.

Reference Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, Bell System Technical Journal, 1948; “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems”, 1945, declassified in 1949; “The Bandwagon”, IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 1956.

Full text “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, 1948

Further reading Claude Shannon

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Norbert Wiener 1894–1964 · United States

Wiener founds cybernetics, the science of steering by feedback loops, and becomes the first scientist to question his own responsibility in public.

The idea

A mathematician, Wiener founds cybernetics in 1948, defining it as the science of control and communication in the animal and in the machine. His central idea is feedback: a system is steered by constantly measuring the gap between the goal aimed at and the result obtained, then correcting itself, exactly as a thermostat regulates the temperature of a room. This idea unifies machines, living organisms and human organisations under a single logic: everywhere, information that circulates and regulates. But Wiener does not stop at theory. After Hiroshima, he publicly refuses to hand his work to a weapons engineer, on the grounds that a scientist must answer for the use that will be made of what they produce. He then devotes the greater part of his late work to the human consequences of what he helped to found.

What it contributes

He founds cybernetics, which gives regulation by information a vocabulary common to machines, to the living and to organisations. Above all, he is the first in this fresco to raise the question of the responsibility of the one who makes: as early as 1950 he announces that automation will devalue the human brain as the first industrial revolution had devalued the arm, and in 1964 he describes the machine that carries out exactly the order given rather than the intention meant, the argument being rediscovered today about artificial intelligence.

Its limit

By reducing the living, the machine and society to systems of regulation by information, cybernetics risks erasing whatever in the human does not come down to control and calculation. And his warnings weighed almost nothing on the industry he helped bring into being: raising the question of responsibility is plainly not enough to have it taken up.

Lineage

Ellul, in the same period, will describe this wholly regulated world under another name: Technique become an autonomous system.

Reference Norbert Wiener, “A Scientist Rebels”, The Atlantic Monthly, January 1947; Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948; The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950; God & Golem, Inc., 1964.

My reading Read in full, in the French edition Cybernétique et société (Seuil, 2014, translated by Ronan Le Roux).

Further reading Norbert Wiener

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Jacques Ellul 1954 / 1977 · France

Ellul argues that Technique has become an autonomous system beyond all political control.

The idea

By “Technique” (with a capital T) Ellul means not machines but the whole body of methods aiming at maximum efficiency in every domain: industry, administration, advertising, leisure. His thesis: this “technical system” has become autonomous. It now obeys a single law, that of optimal output, and it grows of its own accord, since every technical solution creates new problems that in turn call for new techniques. Politics no longer really directs it: politics merely follows.

What it contributes

The first major theory of technique as an autonomous, self-sustaining totality. He anticipates the technological grip of our own age.

Its limit

His determinism is near-total and deeply pessimistic. By treating “Technique” as a uniform block, he leaves little room for action, for resistance, or for internal differences.

Lineage

What, at bottom, does this grip reveal about the very way we see the world? That is Heidegger's question.

Reference Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, 1954; The Technological System, 1977.

Further reading Jacques Ellul

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Martin Heidegger 1954 · Germany

Heidegger holds that modern technology makes us see the whole of nature as a mere stock to be exploited.

The idea

For Heidegger, the essence of technology is not itself technological: it is not first a matter of machines, but a way of making the world appear. Modern technology approaches it in a particular mode he names the Gestell (often rendered as “enframing”): it summons nature to stand ready for exploitation, as an available “standing-reserve”. A river is no longer a river but a reservoir of energy for a dam; a forest, a stock of timber. Everything becomes a resource summoned to be productive.

What it contributes

He wrests technology away from the idea of a mere “neutral means” and thinks it as a way of dwelling in the world. Hence his famous line: “where the danger is, there grows the saving power also”.

Its limit

His thought is highly abstract and offers no concrete purchase for action. It is tinged with nostalgia for the peasant world, and carries grave political blind spots, notably his commitment to Nazism.

Lineage

Simondon answers by a positive route: reconciling us with the technical object instead of fearing it.

Reference Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954 lecture), in Essays and Lectures.

Further reading Martin Heidegger

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Gilbert Simondon 1958 · France

Simondon overturns the fear of machines: it is not technique that alienates us, it is our ignorance of it.

The idea

Simondon disputes the received idea that machines enslave us by their nature. For him, alienation comes from our not understanding technical objects: we treat them either as purely servile tools or as magical threats. He shows that the technical object has its own mode of existence and evolves towards greater internal coherence, what he calls concretisation (the engine, for instance, gradually integrating its functions into a more harmonious whole). The real solution is a “technical culture” that reconciles us with machines.

What it contributes

He offers a concrete remedy for alienation: understanding and “loving” machines. He argues for openness and repairability, making those who understand and tinker with their machines a figure of the avant-garde.

Its limit

His optimism about technical culture underestimates economic capture and relations of power. His thought also predates the digital world and the internet.

Lineage

Stiegler will take up his legacy while reinjecting memory, capitalism, and the idea of the poison that can also be a remedy.

Reference Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 1958.

My reading Read in full, in the 2012 Aubier edition.

Further reading Gilbert Simondon

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Langdon Winner 1980 · United States

Winner proves by example that technical objects can, through their very design, produce injustice.

The idea

Winner defends a striking thesis: “artifacts have politics”. Certain technical objects, that is, encode relations of power through their design alone. His most famous example: the very low bridges built over the New York parkways by the planner Robert Moses, which are said to have blocked buses, and thereby the access of poor and Black populations to the beaches, without any law ever having written it down. Some technologies, he adds, also require a given social organisation: nuclear power, for instance, presupposes highly centralised and secured management.

What it contributes

He makes the power lodged within technique analysable object by object, concrete case by concrete case: a highly operational political reading.

Its limit

His approach focuses on particular artefacts; it offers no overall theory of the technical system.

Lineage

And when the technical object is an instrument of colonisation? That is the ground Fanon explores.

Reference Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, Daedalus, 1980.

Further reading Langdon Winner

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Frantz Fanon 1959 · Martinique / Algeria

Fanon observes one and the same object, the radio, turn from an instrument of colonial domination into a weapon of liberation.

The idea

A psychiatrist and thinker of decolonisation, Fanon studies the case of the radio during the Algerian war. At first rejected by Algerians as a symbol of the French colonial presence, it changes meaning entirely when “the Voice of Fighting Algeria” comes on air: the same device becomes the instrument of the struggle and of a national bond. Fanon draws a powerful idea from this: a technique has no fixed value, it can alienate and then, once reappropriated, liberate, depending on who controls it and on the use made of it.

What it contributes

He thinks technique as ambivalent and reversible within a balance of power: a direct prefiguration of the dialectic between alienation and emancipation.

Its limit

His analysis is anchored in a precise context, the colonial war; it is not a general framework of measurement applicable everywhere.

Lineage

Other thinkers link technical mastery and political sovereignty explicitly: Gandhi, Diop, Nkrumah, Hountondji.

Reference Frantz Fanon, “This Is the Voice of Algeria”, in A Dying Colonialism, 1959.

My reading A targeted reading of The Wretched of the Earth, a work distinct from A Dying Colonialism, the source of the text cited above.

Further reading Frantz Fanon

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Gandhi 1869–1948 · India

Gandhi makes the spinning wheel the symbol of an independence won through simple, mastered tools.

The idea

Facing British domination, Gandhi chooses a humble tool as his political emblem: the spinning wheel (charkha), for spinning one's own cotton. Behind the gesture lies an idea: autonomy (swaraj, “self-rule”) comes through appropriate techniques, on the scale of the village, that anyone can own and master, rather than through imported large-scale industry, which creates dependence. To boycott English textiles by spinning at home is to take back control, technically and politically at once.

What it contributes

He links technique, scale and emancipation, and confronts head-on the colonial industrialism that dispossesses peoples of their know-how.

Its limit

His ideal carries a temptation to refuse technology outright, and a measure of village romanticism, both hard to generalise to a country undergoing industrialisation.

Lineage

Others, conversely, will make mastery of heavy industry the very condition of independence: Diop, Nkrumah.

Reference M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), 1909.

Full text Hind Swaraj, full text

Further reading Gandhi

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Cheikh Anta Diop 1923–1986 · Senegal

This Senegalese scholar holds that there is no real independence for Africa without mastery of science and industry.

The idea

A historian, physicist and anthropologist, Cheikh Anta Diop sets out first to restore Africa's place in the history of civilisations, arguing for the African origin of ancient Egypt. From this he draws a decisive political consequence: merely formal independence is not enough. To be genuinely sovereign, Africa must win scientific, technical and industrial mastery, without which it remains dependent on the former colonial powers. He argues for federation and for industrialisation on a continental scale.

What it contributes

He links history, science and sovereignty, and sketches a pan-African techno-scientific project.

Its limit

This ambition has only rarely been matched by the institutional and financial means needed to carry it out.

Lineage

Nkrumah will turn it into a state programme, under the name of “consciencism”.

Reference Cheikh Anta Diop, The Economic and Cultural Foundations of a Federal State of Black Africa, 1960.

Further reading Cheikh Anta Diop

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Kwame Nkrumah 1909–1972 · Ghana

First leader of independent Ghana, Nkrumah seeks to industrialise so that freedom becomes real rather than nominal.

The idea

Nkrumah, architect of Ghana's independence, forges “consciencism”: a political philosophy aimed at rapid industrialisation, so as to give independence a concrete content. His central thesis, set out in his book on neocolonialism: a nation can be legally free while remaining economically dominated, through its technical, energy and financial dependence on the former metropoles. Real decolonisation therefore demands mastery of the means of production and of energy.

What it contributes

He names and theorises neocolonialism: the domination that persists after official independence, by way of technology and economy.

Its limit

His highly centralised state voluntarism ran up against the global balance of power as much as against internal difficulties.

Lineage

Hountondji will shift the question from industrial ground to that of knowledge itself.

Reference Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism, 1965; Consciencism, 1964.

Further reading Kwame Nkrumah

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Paulin Hountondji 1942–2024 · Benin

This Beninese philosopher denounces a science of the Global South “turned outwards”, which applies knowledge without ever producing it.

The idea

Hountondji analyses what he calls scientific “extraversion”. In countries of the South, research often serves to collect raw data (plants, materials, field sites) which then travel north to be turned into theoretical knowledge in laboratories there, before returning as finished products. The South thus stays confined to application, at the periphery of the world production of knowledge. He argues for “endogenous” knowledge, that is, locally rooted and able to produce theory on the spot.

What it contributes

He opens a genuine geopolitics of knowledge: who produces knowledge, who merely applies it, and with what consequences for power?

Its limit

His contribution is above all a lucid diagnosis; he offers less in the way of a ready-made programme of action.

Lineage

How can this plurality of trajectories be thought without giving way to relativism? That is what Yuk Hui's “cosmotechnics” attempts.

Reference Paulin Hountondji (ed.), Endogenous Knowledge: Research Trails, 1994; African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, 1976.

Further reading Paulin Hountondji

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Bernard Stiegler 1994–2001 · France

Stiegler sums technique up in a Greek word: pharmakon, poison and remedy at once.

The idea

Stiegler starts from a simple idea: technique is humanity's memory deposited outside us, in objects (writing, the book, the photograph, the hard drive). He calls these “tertiary retentions”: memories we did not live through ourselves, but which technique preserves and transmits. Now this exteriorised memory is a pharmakon, the Greek word for poison and remedy alike: the digital can sustain thought and knowledge, or on the contrary capture our attention, short-circuit our faculties and “proletarianise” us, that is, dispossess us of our own knowledge.

What it contributes

He achieves a broad synthesis of Marx, Heidegger and Simondon, and connects technique to digital capitalism (the attention economy). He calls for a “therapeutics” of use: relearning how to make good use of the pharmakon.

Its limit

His work is dense and demanding, his frame remains largely European, and his diagnosis is at times deeply pessimistic.

Lineage

It remains to name power more explicitly, and to step outside Western universalism: that is Yuk Hui's move.

Reference Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, volumes 1 to 3, 1994–2001.

My reading Read in full: Dans la disruption (Babel) and Réenchanter le monde (Champs), works distinct from Technics and Time, cited above.

Further reading Bernard Stiegler

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Anne Alombert 2023 · France

Alombert extends Stiegler into the present: thinking another computing, against “digital schizophrenia”.

The idea

A contemporary philosopher, Anne Alombert works in Bernard Stiegler's legacy. She describes what she calls “digital schizophrenia”: today's technologies, social networks and generative artificial intelligence, are designed to capture our attention and automate thought, at the risk of atrophying our capacities for reflection and memory. But, faithful to the idea of the pharmakon (the tool that can be poison or remedy depending on use), she refuses outright rejection: she argues for a different orientation of digital techniques, more contributory and decentralised, that would support knowledge instead of short-circuiting it.

What it contributes

She brings Stiegler's critique up to date in the age of generative AI and of the large platforms, and makes it concrete: she does not merely denounce, she sketches a possible technological bifurcation.

Its limit

These “contributory” alternatives remain, for now, largely to be built in the face of the economic power and the grip of the large platforms.

Lineage

Others analyse the power already quietly at work in software itself and in our digital habits: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun.

Reference Anne Alombert, Schizophrénie numérique: la crise de l'esprit à l'ère des nouvelles technologies, 2023.

My reading Read in full, in the 2023 Allia edition.

Further reading Anne Alombert (article in French)

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Wendy Hui Kyong Chun 2011–2016 · United States / Canada

Chun shows that software and our digital habits have become a form of power all the more effective for being invisible.

The idea

A media theorist, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun studies the discreet way the digital acts upon power. Two strong ideas. First, software functions as an “ideology”: it executes hidden rules that we follow without seeing them, as though they went without saying. Second, digital media act through habit: by sheer repetition (notifications, updates, daily gestures), they settle into us and make us predictable, which is what allows us to be targeted and steered. She also shows how these systems encode discrimination, racial discrimination in particular, under an appearance of technical neutrality.

What it contributes

She shifts attention from the spectacular to the ordinary: real digital power lodges in invisible code and in habit, not only in the visible large platforms. She links technique, data, discrimination and control.

Its limit

Her approach, rooted in critical media theory, is at times abstract and hard to translate into practical recommendations.

Lineage

It remains to decentre the view entirely away from the West, so as to think other possible relations to technique: that is Yuk Hui's move.

Reference Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, 2011; Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, 2016.

My reading Read in full: Codes, races, climat, habitudes (Presses du réel, 2023), a French collection of the author's essays, distinct from the two titles cited above.

Further reading Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

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Yuk Hui 2016 · China / Hong Kong

This philosopher disputes the idea of a universal technology: every civilisation ties technique to its world-view in its own way.

The idea

Yuk Hui forges the concept of cosmotechnics. His thesis: there is no single universal technology, the same for all peoples. Every major culture articulates technique with its cosmology, that is, with its vision of the world, of morality and of the relation to nature. Ancient Chinese technique, for instance, did not separate the tool from the moral and cosmic order, unlike modern Western technique. The latter is therefore not “technology” as such, but one particular cosmotechnics, which has become dominant and tends to make the whole world uniform.

What it contributes

He pluralises and decentres our view, reconciles the traditions travelled through in this fresco, and opens the possibility of a “bifurcation” in the face of global technological homogenisation.

Its limit

His thought runs a risk of relativism and remains hard to translate into concrete, measurable tools.

Lineage

What is still missing is an instrument for measuring, in each technological trajectory, the actual balance of power: that is the purpose of the systemic definition and of the TEI matrix.

Reference Yuk Hui, The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics, 2016.

Further reading Yuk Hui

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